Posts Tagged ‘Stylometry’

If you like statistics, you’ll love digging into this. What are the odds….?

Stylometry (also called wordprints) is used to determine authorship to anonymous or disputed writings. It has legal, academic and literary uses. It has been used in the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, the Federalist Papers etc. and often used in court.

This technique was first used on the Book of Mormon in the late 1970’s and published in 1980 under the paper titled “Who Wrote the Book of Mormon?” Was it Oliver Cowdery, Joseph Smith, Jr. or Solomon Spaulding or none of the above? A nice statistical who done it.

It was ground breaking. It compellingly showed that the different authors listed in the Book of Mormon did not have the same word patterns and the patterns indicated Oliver Cowdery, Joseph Smith Jr. and Solomon Spaulding were not the authors. However, it was not able to withstand 100% critical analysis but much of the work held valid.

In 2002 John Hilton and associates at Berkley relied on a more sophisticated pattern method. Their work has passed peer review. Using their method they were also successful at identifying non Book of Mormon authorship.

Here are the basic results in a nut shell. The two books withing the Book of Mormon (Nephi and Alma, ancient American prophets) actually are written by different authors or one in a trillion chance of being the same.

The odds that Joseph Smith wrote Alma are 1 in 40,000. The odds that Joseph wrote Nephi are way over 1 in a quintillion (precisely less than 2.7 x 10-20 that goes like this, million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion).

The other potential authors tested were Oliver Cowdery or Solomon Spaulding.

Conclusion = Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery and Solomon Spaulding are not the authors of the two books tested within the Book of Mormon. This may provide evidence enough for you to conduct your own discovery.
Below is John Hilton himself. Below that is the link for even more information on the details